For Windows XP SP3. With that HD6450 card I settled with driver version (20)11-10. Using atioglxx.dll from driver version (20)11-5 in my Il-2 Forgotten battles folder. Beware that not all atioglxx.dll's work with every driver version.
I still have an issue with a horizontal stripe during movie playback, but Videolan/VLC output settings can be changed to avoid that.

They were probably thinking it would be a win-win situation because they'd stop having to care about old architectures, and they could tell people to just give them more money for newer cards when they have problems.

Found a bug in this driver. When you use HDMI to connect to a TV the AMD drivers have a slider to set the overscan to 0. With this driver the setting gets ignored after a reboot and you have to move the slider to the left and then back to zero to work again.

I hate when they do that! Why is it so hard to keep themselves from breaking such out-of-the-way things? I suspect that the Catalyst team employs terrible version control / configuration management practices, because they seem to constantly (re)introduce stupid little bugs.

38x0 has had partially broken rendering in Skyrim since some early patch. It's mysteriously unsupported. Of course 8800 runs the game fine and is older. Lesson is buy NV, I guess. 38x0 is DX10.1 and PCIe 2.0 so it's more advanced but can't handle D3D9 Skyrim?

My favorite recent AMD debacle is undoubtedly the RAGE disaster that took them about 3 months to clean up. They seemed to not have worked on the GL driver prerelease at all.

And yeah I saw the 4000 series issues during the 12.x year as well. Their monthly drivers kept including the same bugs because of how the driver development actually worked (staggered). I'm glad they stopped doing the monthly nonsense. Not so glad that 2000-4000 basically lost real support though.

I don't care for their superior price-performance ratio, fancy game bundles et cetera, I won't be buying AMD after I saw the textureless beauty that was Skulltag on mid-2012 6870 drivers. Their reasoning is perhaps that no one uses GL anyway so why support it? Guess the fact that they drop support for their "old" cards so fast speaks more or less for itself anyway.

It does annoy me that AMD seems to not care about supporting OpenGL, and that they're fairly bad at staying on top of issues with AAA titles. It doesn't make any sense, either, as they obviously have to support OpenGL on Apple, Linux, game consoles, etc. I guess they have completely separate driver codebases for those platforms than they do for Windows?

The problem for me is that I hate how much more marketing-driven nVidia is, so I feel compelled to buy AMD just to avoid rewarding them.

The thing is that the prices between competitors are so similar, it doesn't pay to save so little money. I just go with Intel and Nvidia and everything just works. They are the market leaders and just as affordable.

HunterZ wrote:The problem for me is that I hate how much more marketing-driven nVidia is, so I feel compelled to buy AMD just to avoid rewarding them.

As far as marketing goes, both companies have some stupid shit going on (Nvidia with "The way it's meant to be played" and proprietary PhysX, AMD with their underdog price-performance stuff). The thing is that many AMD fans on those hardware forums seem to be under the impression that their prices, game bundles etc. stem from altruism or something... they don't get that NO hardware company that has had the overall best product has ever given it away for cheap.

The thing is that all next-gen consoles are going to have AMD though. This is where Nvidia pretty much failed. They may have the more solid products and the better standing with enthusiasts, but the really big bucks are made with OEM deals etc. I don't think that PC ports are suddenly going to perform worse on Nvidia as long as they keep up their driver development though. They are just going to miss out on a lot of revenue and will have to concentrate on other sectors.

By the way, the only good marketing in computer history was that of 3dfx... those commercials were truly hilarious